Archive for November, 2011

Always a tricky one when someone wants a quote for a website before telling you their full requirements but we do our best ‘if pushed’ for a quote to give an accurate estimate as the following exchange demonstrates:

[Website Client] We are family run business based in Rainham, Essex. We are currently looking to update our website to make it Bright and modern, incorporating a logo. Bright & clear home page with not to much text. we would like to photos with prices attached, as no one else does this. if you could contact us to discuss ideas and costs.

Some more information about us:
We design, manufacture & fit shop fascias, vehicle vinyl signs & wraps, logo design, handmade advertising boards. We are a family run business, established in the local area for 20 years. No job is to large or to small, we cater for all. We support the local community as much as possible and many of our business customers are on our doorstep. We also support the local drama group & provide them with banners, stage props & scenery free of charge.

We would like our website to be easy to use and would like to have photos of our products changing automatically.
We like to think of ourselves: As Reasonable prices, friendly, professional, creative, reliable.
Or objectives are:To provide more detailed information on our service & products. Also to compete with local competition.
Customers: Most of them are local based companies, they are local shops & business. Large companies and all mobile contractors.

[Delicious Webdesign] Believe we talked about a redesign to your business brochure site and webcopy (text) think that would give you a great grounding for your updated business website. Here are some links that show you what’s included in business brochure sites and webcopy (links given)
Hope this sounds understandable ( I sometimes use techy terms so sorry if I confused you on the phone)
Please take a look at our Website Design Project questionnaire and if they are relevant please answer those questions or tell me when we next talk / meet.

[Website Client] Sorry I have not responded to your email, it has been a very busy week.
I have printed a copy of the planner, shall go through it this evening and foward to you tomorrow.

[Delicious Webdesign] Great, Lots of information for us on there, please confirm these are the sites you like and want us to use as ‘guide’ sites for your redesigned site

Website 1 and 2: Clear Design, not to much text
Website 3: We like the toolbar for products. text on Signs, easy to use and navigate.

Website Sections / Pages
I see you like the local main competitor website, will you want the same products that they have? I have included your products and their products in the page list below, ideally you would have one page on each with unique text / images for each but that will obviously cost more for webcopy (text) and be more work for us building the website so perhaps you can tell us if you dont wall all the products / services then highlight the ones you want to have their own text / pages:

Home page
About us
Products / Services
Exterior signs (Shops)
Interior signs
Vehicle graphics (vinyls and wraps)
Exhibtions
POS / Displays / Banners
Digital Signage
Logos
Full digital printing & laminating * full vehicle digital wrapping
Pvc banner printing
Shop facias & window graphics
Architectural signage
Printed corex boards
Engraving / laser etching
Label printing
Acrylic & metal fabrication
Health & safety / road signage
Testimonials
Gallery
Contact

Webcopy
Do you want us to provide your webcopy for you? or do you want to do it yourself? here is some more info on webcopy http://www.delicious-webdesign.com/webcopy.html a guide price is 12 pages / 3000 words with your guidance will be approximately £300

News page
Do you want a news page (blog) that you can use to create new sections / pages when you require them? you could take photos of all your work and describe new jobs as you complete them (excellent for the website’s ‘health’ in the search engines and great for the potential customers to view)

We are confident we can produce you a website to exceed your requirements but need to know answers to the above to start to get a better idea of whats required / costings etc.

[Website Client] Yes these are the web sites that we liked. Can you please give me an estimated price for a site with 10 pages, as we are looking at costing.

[Delicious Webdesign] Hi Julie, hope you had a good weekend, If you answer the questions in the email send on Friday then we can give you a more accurate price but if you want an estimated price then a simple 10 page website with contact page / gallery and other services pages but without a Blog / News page and without us doing the Webcopy using your ‘guide sites’ as examples as the site you want and taking your answers from the ‘website design project planner’, the cost will be approximately £600, if you look at the website projects page it gives full details about what is included (your transfer and hosting for the first year is included obviously)

I think if you wanted a page for every service and page for all the heading below (23+ pages) and want us to incorporate the blog it will be classed as our ‘Premium plus’ website package and will cost between £1200 – £1299) you can reduce the price if you want us to do less ‘SEO’ (website optimisation) on the site. The Premium Plus website comes as standard with a one month website optimisation project.

[Website Client] Many thanks for your time. This information has proved very useful, we most certainly want your company to take care of our website, will arrange a meeting next week to organise payment and final details, we always thought we would be using your company’s services this time for our website redesign.

Lots of my clients are experiencing a lot of sales calls from ‘SEO’ companies attempting to part them from their money in return for promises of website success, take a look at one of the emails received today by one client that demonstrates

a) They are unable to grasp the fact that the client shouldn’t be targeting unrelated terms (by giving them 5 search terms that is not applicable to their website / business)
b) They cant spell ’tilers’
c) They are claiming to be able to rank a website for terms that dont appear on the website (very hard and pretty pointless)
d) They are using hard sales tactics (repeat calls, offering discounts)

email text
——————
Thanks for your time today.

The basics of what we discussed are below:

(1) Natural Indexing on Google (centre of the page NOT PAY PER CLICK)
(2) Your site would be indexed under 5 key phrases (see below)
(3) Takes around 8 weeks to achieve rankings.
(4) You could then ease off / or stop the Pay Per Click that you do at £60 plus vat per month
(5) Saving you over £464 per year

Key words:

(1) Electrician Essex
(2) Plasters Essex
(3) Carpenters Essex
(4) Plumbers Essex
(5) Tillers Essex

This would normally be £495 Plus vat

However I will discount it down to £300 plus vat as you are an existing customer.

We do all the work, you don’t have to do anything.

Call you Monday as agreed, hope you see the sense it doing Natural Indexing.
————–
Always ignore these annoying phone calls, do you really want to trust your precious website to someone that phones you up out of the blue?

Whether the aim of your website is to maximize your quality sales enquiries, or to create online purchases, we partner with companies like you on a unique ‘pay-on-results’ basis, where we take on substantial risk and essentially invest ourselves in developing your online business.

We make sure that your website is not only acting as an ‘online brochure’ but is creating the maximum number of high quality, targeted sales leads that you can quickly turn into profitable customers.

We do this by developing your website into an active sales conversion tool, turning website visitors into customers through our proprietary ‘Convert on Arrival’ process. We can also work to deliver more traffic to your site and broaden your ‘sales funnel’ if required.

We would be delighted to discuss similar work we have carried out, and the consequent increases in our clients’ businesses. We would also be happy for my team to carry out an analysis of your website so that you can see the kind of improvements we would make, and the possible increases in your business.

We reiterate that because this is based on our proven approach to increasing business delivered through your website, our fees are on a ‘pay on results’ basis to demonstrate our commitment to your bottom line results.

Everyone starting a brand new business / venture is going to be nervous, unsure about everything and anxious about the business and the website they need get created to enhance / promote and compliment their new business, here is a conversation I had at a trade fair then on the phone and then on Facebook chat that demonstrates a normal client’s worries about having a website built for them.

[new website owner] thinking about starting a new business and as such would need your company to create us a website and promote it in Google.

[website design company] do you still need us to do you website, you mentioned it previously?

[new website owner] I’m not sure a website would help. I used to have a website for my parties and I didn’t get my business directly from it. All my business was recommendations. I like the name of the website you recommended.

[website design company] websites are long term things and possibly your website wasnt promoted / created correctly / optimised before, we are expert at doing that.

[new website owner] Thing is thoe with my goods I don’t post them I deliver to the client or they collect them. Its only small at the moment. I’m doing a craft fair in 2 weeks time to guage people’s expecations.

[new website owner] def looking into getting a website done soon. A friend has said they will do it for me but I want it done so it can be found up high on search thats what you do isnt it? I dont get it all really, seems very complicated.

[website design company] yes thats exactly what we do – anyone can create a website but you need it to be found in Google to thrive in the business world you are entering.

[new website owner] and how do you do that is it hard?

[website design company] yeah of course its hard but we have ways to make you a success. For an example of our previous good seo work, in google search for ‘essex builders’ and we have three clients in the top ten – thats a real competitive term.

[new website owner] Ok so if I provided all writing and photos how much we looking at?

[website design company] We need to know lots of things before giving you a cost – I could say it cost £x but that would be silly – you need to tell me exactly what you want and I can tell you the cost – things we need to know include:

How many pages on your website / do you have company colours / do you have a logo? / what menu sections do you want? / what sites do like? / do you you want to use then as a ‘guide’ for the design of your site? / do you want to update the text yourself / do you want a news section (blog) ? / do you want us to promote it actively for 1 week, 1 month or more perhaps 3 months? / how many photos will you provide? / have you any images can you provide? / how many galleries do you want? etc etc…….
We have a normal process (website project design) questionnaire for this or you can just come for a meeting.

[new website owner] going ask my sister if she can do some wording for me and put a rough draft of how id like it to look. so do you think £425 would get me a basic sight like what i showed you?

[website design company] yes – dont worry this is all ‘simple and easy’ for us but its really important you get what you want and also its created to earn you money by being ‘search friendly’ – also if you have a strict budget then can build you something that fits exactly to that budget (obviously you get a facebook friend discount).

[new website owner] Oh god its confusing isn’t it lol. I don’t no really what I want I shall look at other peoples to get an idea I think

[website design company] yes its a good idea to find sites you like the look of.

[new website owner] ok well will have to be in a couple of months as have no money left but defo want one as think it could help. may be something not to involved. simple but gets the point across

[website design company] can easily start now with a small site:
4 pages with one contact page / one gallery / one about us / home page and one services page with potential to create more pages / more galleries / add a blog at a later date

You will get the webstie name (domain) / hosting / email / site design / logo creation / 6 pages with you supplying all text and photos included in the website cost. We have a developer becoming free next Wednesday that I could put on this. Your new website will be SEO friendly / W3C compliant and would be much better / nicer / easier to use that the guide site you showed us earlier.

[new website owner] I am starting to see why I was recommended to me, after speaking to you on the phone you really have make this should easy and have put my mind at rest about your ability to make me something that looks and works great and will earn us a living eventually.

[website design company] yes but for you there would be lots of SEO love thrown in, if you didnt know seo = search engine optimisation = make it rank highly as quick as possible, as I said previously its great that you can provide some good webcopy, the more unique content you can provide the better

[new website owner] well my sis is good at that but she has been really busy with work. im terrible so would need her. my sis got the brains lol. yeah will roughly draw somthing up. Do you think it would get me business. Iv looked into doing wedding fairs and tables are £300 I can advertise in mags i no, would this SEO do you have to keep this up then.

[website design company] you can advertise online in directories / review sites / forums etc for free. We can also set you up with a free £50 google advertising voucher if you start a Google PPC campaign, your site would be built with good SEO (SEO love) and will give you some tips to help yourself if you dont want to pay us for any more SEO work.

To give you some idea about other clients and how much work some businesses put into their standard business brochure websites and their website marketing – Some website owners / clients spend over £5,000 on a website and then £1000 per month on SEO and PPC advertising

[new website owner] That’s a lot of money, how much if wanted you to keep doing what you do to keep near the top. is it monthly?

[website design company] can work to your budget – if you pay £100 per month you will get £100 of work (actually you would get more ) You really need to sort your designs / ideas out then come and meet me at the office here to let me show you whats possible. You will be impressed with our previous successes.

[new website owner] £100! id need to be selling a lot of trees! lol i dont really get it tbh. basically if i got you to do a website then if I didnt get you to keep doing what you do you wouldnt see my website in search is that what your saying?

[website design company] not at all, the more you put into it the better its ‘starting position’ in the google rankings and its ‘visitor numbers’ will be but there is always room to improve – you cant create a new site and expect business to flood in without lots of work and effortif your budget is limited I would recommend you following my list of website promotion activities to make it work, dont forget you get business not only from Google but from review sites / directories / facebook / twitter etc

[new website owner] yeah i know that I wont get loads of business just like that just want to know whether once site is done how much per month is needed to put in as its all about the money and whether its worth me doing it or not. My previous website didnt do anything. I got all my work through advertising in mags and people who had my parties would tell people.

[website design company] only a few clients with big budgets pay us to do SEO work on a monthly basis – you can do some of the SEO work yourself but the site will be ‘polished’ and ready for action and good rankings straight after its launched.

[new website owner] ah ok that sounds ok. is it hard doing it yourself thoe asa i dont have a clue.

[website design company] I would say even the smallest site enhances your normal advertising – much better to look at someones previous work on a website and makes you seem genuine and a ‘real’ business

[new website owner] yes true. everyone at the craft fair asked whether i had a website. I need a website obviously. One last question can i be called sweetcreations as think someone else already called it as my bussiness cards have will have sweet creations on

People typically think that changing / updating the look of a website by making it look ‘jazzier’ will improve visitor numbers and conversions, even though there is a slight possibility that one design may appeal to one person more than another its unlikely once a design has been professionally created and coded that it will turn potential clients or customers away. If your business has noticed a downturn then there are many things to address before the site gets ‘redesigned’. Here is an example list of suggestions that we could give to a typical website, our recommendations:

1, Create permanent content for all pages so even when there are no content in terms of job vacancies there is something for the search engines and people to read.
Recommend – 10 pages relating to your job types / 3000 words- 300 words per page, all text will be search friendly / unique / relevant and rank highly using the flesch reading index.

2, Upgrade your contact form to included more relevant and appropriate fields, to show similar fields to your main competitor
Options
a) Just upgrading current form to include extra fields.
b) Upgrading form type to remove ‘captcha text’ and replace it with security question and add fields as above.
c) Updating form to allow a document upload function.

3 Begin a Google PPC Campaign
Costs – 10% of advertising costs – free £50 voucher added to your account when created
Need your Google Account details and you to Create a Google Adwords account then pass us the admin details

4 Facebook Advertising campaign
Costs – 10% of advertising costs

5 Downloadable forms
Create a PDF optimised form from your application form and create a ‘downloads / application form’ button. As your website hasn’t got a natural place to put these links (like a column down one side of the page) I propose to create a new page under ‘Contact’ Called ‘Downloads’ and then put this on there

6 Marketing the site – This can be done by yourself or by one of our SEO / Admin girls, you could add yourself to lots of business directories / forums / review sites / Google+ / Twitter etc etc and contribute to their online discussions or add content to your ‘account’ also we can do a mini SEO project on the site that will include a lot of offsite marketing and 1-2 press releases.

7 Create a news page / Blog where you can control the content and add pages / photos to your site when required – this is a very cost effective measure to improve the content to your site.

This may be of interest to you, if you have a website that is not ranked on page 1 of Google for 1 or more of your most competitive terms, but you want to be there.

I know several web designers who build beautiful and easy to navigate sites for their clients, but who do not have sufficient off page SEO expertise. As a result, their clients sites are not ranked highly by the search engines.

If this is true for you , we can take steps within our SEO programs to get your website ranked on page 1 of Google and we will assume the work involved in achieving that however hard it may be.

We have so much confidence in the SEO techniques that we use, that we are prepared to only take a deposit until a presence on page 1 of Google has been achieved. At that point, we will expect the final payment if the end of the project time and goals have been achieved, we can continue with other SEO projects on the same website as long as the SEO work proves profitable to your business. The arrangement can be terminated at any time by either party.

This proposition takes the risk out of commissioning SEO work from the so called SEO cowboys that offers No results, no fee type arrangements but always seem to produce a worthless result and charge a big fee.

You will be aware that this proposition is highly unusual. Almost all SEO consultants take money up front and charge monthly fees, even if they do not get a result.

There are 2 benefits for you in this proposition.

1. Obviously you will be helping your website to improve its online business results giving you more enquires and sales.
2. SEO changes will be permanent.

Hope you want to explore this further, we will be happy to show you lots of of my own websites that are currently ranked on page 1 of Google for keywords that are competitive on a national and international / global basis.

We know how important it is to be visible in the search engines. We know you need to use the internet more effectively for your business. But we also need to take care of your business. You will find it hard to do both. Well, you take care of your business. we’ll take care of the internet for you. Our expert website design / SEO staff understand how to make search engines your friend.

Hope everything is good with you and your business. I am just doing a one year review of your site, as we do for every business, and saw that the rankings snapshot I done for you when talking about your SEO previously has not improved for the 5 search terms we selected. This is compounded by the reduction in website visitors from this time last year, you are showing a 25% reduction in new and existing visitor numbers. Your decision to allow another Essex Website Design company to SEO or optimise your site looks to have been a poor decision at this point.

Worryingly your rankings have actually decreased in 2 search engines (Google and Yahoo) and only made a modest increase in one, obviously during our SEO projects we need to choose 10 – 50 search terms for your site to optimise, so these search terms are only a small selection but they are probably your most important search terms, we like to think that big increases could be achieved quite easily:

Looking at the competitiveness of your industry and the other websites ranking in the top 3, we would like to think we can achieve a number one ranking for your primary search term (although cannot guarantee this) and would like to be able to put your site in our portfolio of SEO success at a later date. If you look at our previous SEO successes you will see we are more than capable of boosting your rankings.

If you dont want us to fully optimise your site then here are some cost effective recommendations for your site if you wanted to improve it, which should positively improve its position in the search engines:

1, Add a Blog, as I showed you earlier there are full details about this on the website. An integrated blog will be one of the most cost effective additions to your site and allow you to add as many pages as you want (and you can optimise these pages yourself with a little help from me to point you in the right direction), you can add photos and video to these pages to make them more interesting also.

2, Add some extra pages to the site perhaps have more testimonials pages or add more photos to your gallery or add pages dedicated to new things you can offer, cost is dependent on exactly what you want, and as you know we can do the text for you also.

3, PPC campaign – Perhaps have a Google PPC advert you can start this on a small budget of £1 per day, will charge only the Google PPC charge plus 10% for managing it for you.

Conversations from an Essex based Website design company to one of their clients regarding their website. This demonstrates a massive lack of knowledge by the website design company as they recommended the most complained about SEO company in the UK and as they have no SEO knowledge themselves they had no idea how their ‘personalised’ results were giving them a different view of the Google rankings to their client. If in doubt get lots of opinions and advice and don’t trust ‘friends’ with all your business website requirements unless you are sure of their abilities.

[essex business owner] I have just had this from an SEO expert – They still maintain we are slipping back in the search engine rankings. I must admit we don’t appear to be getting many web enquiries recently, and almost no enquiry forms recently. Can you advise.

[SEO Experts] Did you ever consider the site changes and / SEO offer we gave? I mention it as I was looking at rankings of [your primary search terms] for companies yesterday and noticed that you are still moving down or sideways along the rankings. In Google your ranking for your most competitive search term [search term] is now 8th (it was 4th about a year ago when we first benchmarked you.

We are confident in getting you increased rankings and perhaps even in the top 3 for 4-5 different search terms and as we have done a fair bit of preparation work on your website we are willing to reduce the cost of our 3 month SEO project for you with no monthly commitment afterwards, plus we will reduce the cost of text / webcopy and the blog by 10% if you decide you want to increase your rankings / visitor numbers and website standing / popularity then this is a good option for you.

[Essex based website design company] You did not pay me for any SEO work however I optimised for more than 5 phrases within the cost. 3 months SEO work at that cost is absolutely shocking and is more than what you paid to have the whole site designed and built. If you want to give something like SEO optimisation a whirl, pay a much bigger reputable company about £25 a month. The company I recommended to you appear top for most search phrases on the search engines regarding SEO. And as said before, this website design company is offering you top 3 (which you already appear in my neck of the woods) so where will that leave his other customers?

Your site is fully content managed so you can get a company on board and manage all of this yourself, I will then help if any technical issues arise. Please don’t use this other website design and SEO company.

Prior to building the company Delicious Webdesign the owner James worked in IT for nearly 20 years, one of his roles was in Software Configuration Management / Release Management as a Consultant. Knowledge of this and the skills and IT and website awareness that was picked up through his career have benefited Delicious Webdesign’s clients as there is not much James doesn’t know or doesn’t know how to find it out in the IT and the Internet world, attached is a presentation that he gave to senior executives at a major company. Just for interest have a look at this presentation

Recent review we done for a client, to give you an idea of the first brief overview we give.

What did we do?
• Built a list of keywords
• Searched for each keyword
• Ranked every website found

Well, what an excellent site! I’m attaching the summary of the scores, and a presentation format that gives you the highlights / most significant points.

In short, it comes up well, and against the competitors you spoke of too, although when you look into the detail, you will see a point that says ‘Ranks poorly on search engines’. Check the spreadsheet – what this is referring to is that although you may well be #1 for the main search terms, there are a number of other search terms in your meta tags that are not so strong in the search engines, to such an extent that I might query the value of having them at all. Some are simply far too broad / generic to be of value (‘exam’, ‘course’, ‘instructor’….) and others just not registering on Google (‘padi instructor courses’)

In terms of what additional actions you could do, a few points emerge around driving more traffic to the site and converting it:

Social Media. You have a Facebook page but no Twitter presence (or if you do, we couldn’t find it linked to the site). Given the nature of what you do, I would have anticipated that Social Media could help you quite a lot
PPC – I can see too that you have a PPC ad, but the results from it look like a testing of the water (pardon the obvious pun). Again, I might expect that PPC could drive additional traffic to the site. That said, I wouldn’t include the Google AdSense on your front page, if at all – I appreciate you are advertising dive companies, but it risks site visitors clicking through and away from your site and affecting your own conversion
More user ‘engagement’ features, building on (a) video and (b) your instructor profiles. I would suggest too thinking about what the actual conversion goal of the site is (Filling in the Contact Form?) and making this more prominent, and structuring the content to guide site visitors to this goal. Also link your analytics to it

Regarding Your lack of Twitter account

What could I do on Twitter?
• Talk to users directly
• Spread word of your site
• Build a marketing asset

Why should I care about social Media like Twitter and Facebook?
• Over 600m social users
• 22% of all time online
• Impacts SEO
• Impacts credibility

Why is the Freshness of a website important?
• Positive effect on search
• Positive effect on users

Summary
Substantial amount of content
Occasionally shared socially
Writing is quite easy to understand
Quick to load
Analytics is used
Updated regularly

additionally some technical points for consideration for the SEO of the website

Will the points below be possible? I consider point 1, especially, to be very important in terms of the SEO of the site. The title of any page is agreed upon by SEO experts as the number 1 on-page ranking factor and having all pages ‘diluted’ with the standard index page title text cannot be beneficial for long-tail searches.

1, Is it possible to not have the main website title added to the end of the product name to form each page title (on every product page) Currently all page Titles on the products pages are made up of the product name + page title from ‘website promotion and marketing’ options.
This dilutes the page title unnecessarily and normally makes the title longer than the 60-70 chars that is recommended

2, There are a couple of html errors within the framework (not closing a specific function, not giving type type=”text/javascript” to the javascript function, incorrect parameter for align command, not closing a function). These are not user / admin accessible and was wondering if they would be easy to fix (we know that xhtml / css compliance is a small factor but better to comply than not and these may cause display probs on some browsers)

3, Additionally to point 1 I see that the description and keywords meta data has a similar setup whereby the main description and keywords are added on to the end of the individual descriptions and keywords, is there a way to change this or opt out of it.

If you wish to give us a call to follow up on any points, please do